of his knowledge of the strange unnatural plant! All plants had been
plants to him until, one day, he read the life of the mistletoe. But
that was English mistletoe; so the boy's wonder world of plant life was
still as far away as Mars, when, rambling alone through the swamp along
the creek, he stopped under a big curious bunch of green, high up in one
of the gums, and--made his first discovery.

So the boy climbed up again this Christmas Day at the peril of his
precious neck, and brought down a bit of that old romance.

I followed the stream along through the swamp to the open meadows, and
then on under the steep wooded hillside that ran up to the higher land
of corn and melon fields. Here at the foot of the slope the winter sun
lay warm, and here in the sheltered briery border I came upon the
Christmas birds.

There was a great variety of them, feeding and preening and chirping in
the vines. The tangle was a-twitter with their quiet, cheery talk. Such
a medley of notes you could not hear at any other season outside a city
bird store. How far the different species understood one another I
should like to know, and whether the hum of voices meant sociability to
them, as it certainly meant to me. Doubtless the first cause of their
flocking here was the sheltered warmth and the great numbers of
berry-laden bushes, for there was no lack either of abundance or variety
on the Christmas table.

In sight from where I stood hung bunches of withering chicken or frost
grapes, plump clusters of blue-black berries of the greenbrier, and
limbs of the smooth winterberry bending with their flaming fruit. There
were bushes of crimson ilex, too, trees of fruiting dogwood and holly,